While Life Is Difficult For All Kosovars, A Most Unimaginable Terror Is Reserved For The Smallest Refugees.

His sister Vlora, 5, his brother Ferid, 17, and two others from their village died the same way last week, he said, when the family and another mother and child from the village attempted to flee over the snow-topped Shar Mountains.

When mourners came to the tent in the Macedonian refugee camp where he now stays, Vahid could not face them--nor could he utter a word. He sat stock-still on the edge of the cot and stared uncomprehendingly. After a while, he simply covered his face with his hands the way a toddler might try to hide from demons.

In the ramshackle border town of Struga, aid workers tried to discover the identity of a 2-year-old girl too terrified to speak her name.

She became separated from her parents when Macedonian police abruptly and rather brutally cleared a makeshift refugee camp at Blace, 80 miles away. Without regard to family units, people were packed into buses and trucks that headed off in a dozen different directions.

In the refugee camps that have sprouted outside Kosovo's borders, the first order of business in the fourth week of the war is to piece together the families that have been shattered by Belgrade's ferocious campaign to purge the province of ethnic Albanians.

When Serbs go in to expel Kosovars from a village, the usual pattern has been to separate the men--especially young men--from the women and children. As a result, the message boards in the refugee camps are filled with a thousand desperately scrawled pleas of men trying to find their wives and children, of parents trying to find older sons.

In Skopje, the Macedonian capital, Lulzim and Valbona Jusufi are desperate for word of their month-old son. When Serbian police gave the couple 5 minutes to vacate their house in Urosevac, the infant, who has a serious respiratory ailment, was 20 miles away in a hospital in Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital.

With all communications cut, the Jusufis can only trust that Serb doctors and nurses will protect the life of an Albanian infant until the war is over.

"The scale of this thing is unimaginable. We're not dealing with a few kids who have had some traumatic experiences, but with a whole population . . . that has been severely traumatized," said Rune Stuvland, a Norwegian psychologist who has spent much of the last six years working with children who have been scarred by the wars that have raged across the former Yugoslavia.

"This is a war against families and children. The whole purpose (of ethnic purges) is to destroy a social fabric. That's why you target families and children."

Even more urgent are the cases of young children who turn up in the camps with no parents or relatives to care for them.

At the Brazde Transit Camp, Jehona Aliu, a 5-year-old with lively brown eyes and impossibly long lashes, plays happily with the other children. At night, she sings herself to sleep. No one knows where her parents or her two brothers and two sisters are.

Two weeks ago, she was found wandering in the filth and garbage of the encampment along the border near Blace where Macedonian authorities confined tens of thousands of refugees for days before loading them onto buses and dispatching them to new locations. In the confusion, Jehona got left behind.

British NATO soldiers who found Jehona have launched an all-out effort to locate her parents, but with the refugees now scattered as far as Turkey and Norway, they've had no luck.

For the time being, the little girl is being cared for by Xhavit and Fatmire Cecelija, generous strangers whose own children are missing.

The Cecelijas were forced to evacuate their village in Kosovo on April 2. The couple put their two sons, Agon, 6, and Ardin, 3, in a car with neighbors while they rode out in a farm wagon drawn by a tractor.

The group from their village joined a long refugee column on the road to the border. Along the route, the tractor broke down and the parents became separated from their children. Later, the road forked. Serbs diverted some vehicles to the Jazince border crossing and others to the Blace crossing.

When Fatmire Cecelija arrived at Blace, there was no sign of her children. She assumed they must have gone to Jazince.

For nine days while she was stranded at the border and, later, confined in the refugee camp, she tried to calm herself with the knowledge that at least her sons were with neighbors.

When she finally was able to leave the camp and check the register of refugees at the Jazince crossing, there was no record of her neighbors or her children. Other refugees told her that Serb police had forced some families to turn back.

Now she fears the children are among the estimated 400,000 "internally displaced" people seeking refuge in the forests and mountains of Kosovo.